Arachin, Chapter 5, Mishnah 4. This chapter continues to trace when a pledge to hekdesh becomes a binding debt, and what happens when death interrupts the process before payment is made.
What We Learned Earlier
In mishnah 2 we dealt with a person who pledged his own erech or his own market value and then died before handing over the money. There we drew a sharp line between the two kinds of pledges.
An erech is a fixed sum. The Torah sets it according to age and gender, and no court needs to weigh anything or reach a judgment about the person. Because the figure is objective and settled from the start, the obligation attaches the instant the words leave his mouth. If he dies afterward, the debt is already in place, and his yorshin, his heirs, pay it out of the estate.
A pledge of market value works differently. Here the amount is whatever this particular person would fetch as a slave on the open market, and that requires an actual evaluation. Until the assessment takes place, there is no sum and no debt. So if the man died before being evaluated, nothing had ever crystallized, and the heirs owed nothing.
The Case Before Us
Our mishnah shifts the focus away from the speaker himself. A man now obligates himself for the fixed erech, or for the assessed worth, of a different individual, and he dies before the money ever reaches the Temple treasury.
Pledging Another Person's Erech
"Ha'omer erko shel peloni alai": one who declares, "the erech of such-and-such rests upon me," committing himself to hand that fixed Torah sum over to hekdesh. The mishnah rules: "Meit hanoder vehanidar, yitnu hayorshin" - should the man who made the vow die, and even should the person named in the vow die as well, his heirs pay.
The reasoning follows directly from what we established. An erech needs no evaluation of the living body in front of us. The moment the words were spoken, a defined amount became a debt on the speaker's estate. Neither death can undo it, so the heirs settle the account.
Pledging Another Person's Market Value
"Damav shel peloni alai": one who declares, "the value of such-and-such rests upon me," obligating himself for whatever that man is worth on the market. The first ruling: "Meit hanoder, yitnu hayorshin" - the one who vowed dies, and his heirs nevertheless pay.
Trace the order of events. The words are spoken, and the man who spoke them dies before any court has set a price. The person named in the vow, however, remains alive, and he is later brought forward and assessed. From the moment that assessment is completed, the obligation takes effect retroactively, dating back to when the vow was first pronounced.
This is the key point. We said that a market value pledge does not become a debt until the assessment is made, but when the assessment does eventually take place, it does not create a fresh obligation from that day forward. It activates the one that was already waiting from the moment of the vow. So even though the man who spoke the words is no longer here, the debt is dated to his lifetime, and it passes to his heirs along with the rest of his estate.
The mishnah's second ruling reverses the result: "Meit hanidar, lo yitnu hayorshin." Where the man named in the vow died before any court could set his price, the heirs are exempt.
At that point the process has nowhere to go. Everything about a damim pledge hangs on a court assessment, and the one person who needed to be assessed is no longer available. A corpse cannot be priced: "she'ein damim lameitim," a dead body carries no worth on the slave market. Since no evaluation can ever be made, the sum was never fixed, the obligation never matured, and nothing is collected from the estate.